Up Yours: An Affront on skirt! magazine

By Melissa Saunders

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If you haven't noticed skirt! magazine amongst the gaggle of free publications, then you have been spared the pain of looking at its hideous lime green box. You may have also been pardoned from reading the aforementioned hagmag and trying to decipher any meaning from it. It sticks out like a cankersore and similarly causes feelings of discomfort and shame. According to the magazine's manifesto, skirt! "is all about women ... their work, play, families, creativity, style, health and wealth, bodies and souls. skirt! is an attitude ... spirited, independent, outspoken, serious, playful and irreverent, sometimes controversial, always passionate."

What this mission statement fails to mention is that skirt! just also happens to be an embarrassment to vagina-owners/lovers everywhere.

Call me "irreverent" or "controversial" but skirt! doesn't exactly help build a substantial case for female empowerment. Maybe I'm a little jaded but how is "trying a new pseudonym at Starbucks" going to change your life or make anyone take you seriously? The barista doesn't care if you are "Lourdes (sultry and mysterious)" or if you're Lola (the notorious blowjob queen of the Financial District). They are basically there to make your latte with a shot of fuck-you. Yes, this may appeal to the "playful" side of feminism, but it's almost as bad as the New York Times pegging The Hills' Heidi Montag as a feminist hero (fyi: if you were serious about that whole thing, NYT, please note that Beth Ditto could eat Montag for breakfast).

skirt! is not only ridiculous but ridiculously put together. The giant, colorful letters serve as eye candy and merely take up space in place of, I don't know, meaningful content? Who's the demographic here, confident capable women, bright-eyed toddlers or the visually impaired? If you're going to kill so many trees then there is no need to be so fucking smug about the matter. And then there's the hypocrisy. One unusually well-penned article—"How Can You Be a Feminist Without Knowing?" by Chloe Angyal—is a compelling call-to-arms about the stigma of the word "feminist." "First," Angyal writes, "stop criticizing your body ... every time you do, you're reinforcing the idea that women are only valuable if they are physically attractive." Yet three pages later there's a half-page advertisement offering "Facial Rejuvenation for the aging face, rhinoplasty, facelift, blephanoplasty (eye lift) [and] chin and cheek augmentation." There's an added bonus: If you mention skirt! magazine you receive a discount. There's nothing like women uniting for a common cause: vanity.

At times, skirt! makes me want to either throw up in my mouth or throw in the towel. Maybe I should just accept defeat; misconceptions and stereotypes about women win—NANNY NANNY BOO BOO! But ultimately it's going to take shit like this to weed out those with less-than-stellar intentions in this whole feminism thing. Yes, my repulsion to skirt! may make me out to be a cynical, indignant bitch. But, hey, anger makes me a modern girl.